Agree:

An entrepreneurial culture thrives when it’s easy to try lots of new ideas. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things. There is something wrong with our system when I can make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can’t afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business.

Yanis Varoufakis
Former finance minister of Greece, is Professor of Economics at the University of Athens

Either we are going to have a basic income that regulates this new society of ours, or we are going to have very substantial social conflicts that get far worse with xenophobia and refugees and migration and so forth.

It comes from the right wing originally. Milton Friedman proposed it for example. From his point of view it was part of an effort to undermine welfare state measures. But it doesn’t have to have a reactionary component. It can be interpreted as something progressive. That people have rights. In fact if you read the universal declaration of human rights, 1948, take a look at article 45. It says peo...See More

Sam Altman
President of Y Combinator. Investor at Reddit, Stripe, Change.org, Pinterest and many others

I think it’s good to start studying [basic income] early. I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale.

Enrique Dans
Professor of Innovation at IE Business School and blogger

Utopia? Not at all. We need to advance the discussion and make politicians understand that it is the only way forward. And if we don’t move forward, we’re going to end up in a place none of us is going to like.

We're about to lose some of the most basic programs we had [because of technology], like Medicare, potentially. I don’t think there's any proof that it's any more politically feasible to hold on to what we have than to build on a big new idea.

Jean-Yves Duclos
Minister of Families, Children and Social Development in Canada

I think it’s the principles behind the idea [of a guaranteed income] that matter. These principles are greater simplicity for the government, greater transparency on the part of families and greater equity for everyone

There has always been someone who put trust in me and said: Mr. Werner, show us what you can do. Exactly the same way the basic income says: We grant you so that you can live humbly but with dignity, and now you can show us what you can do.

Use the tax-transfer mechanism (e.g. through a guaranteed minimum income for all, or an ambitious negative income tax, public funding of health care and long-term care etc.) to support those left behind by technological advances.

David Rolf
Vice President of SEIU and President of SEIU Local 775 in Seattle

I happen to think universal basic income and a high minimum wage work well in combination to produce tighter labor markets, more consumer spending power, and if McDonald's want to lure you out of your rock band or off your couch to go and cook french fries, they ought to have to pay a premium for that.

Disagree:

I do not believe in unconditional basic income because this just encourages people to be trapped in low skilled jobs without a meaningful path to climb up to do better work.
So rather than to pay people to “do nothing” I would rather see a new “New deal” where we pay you to study because I think that today we know how to educate people at scale and the society is pretty good at finding meaningf...See More

Economically, states already guarantee a basic salary under certain conditions, for example in cases of unemployment or extreme poverty. With universal basic income, this assistance would no longer be temporary or linked to a certain condition, and I don’t think it would be sustainable. Moreover, I don’t like the idea of a world where work is no longer a form of self-realisation for citizens. I im...See More

Yuval Noah Harari
Israeli historian and a tenured professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Paying people not to work will only increase inequality and rancor. [...] If universal basic income is aimed to improve the objective conditions of the average person in 2050, it has a fair chance of succeeding. But if it is aimed to make people subjectively more satisfied with their lot in order to prevent social discontent, it is likely to fail.

A basic income guarantee is a neo-liberal strategy for serfdom without the work ... In addition to a Job Guarantee we also demand a Services Guarantee. It is no good having a bare minimum income if the dentists and doctors and shops in your town are closed and the public transport system is deficient.

Tony Atkinson
Research Fellow at Oxford and Professor at the London School of Economics

Anke Hassel
Sociologist. Professor at the Hertie School of Governance. Director of Hans Böckler Foundation

The basic income will further divide society and prevent social mobility. Those who, due to their family background, have good prospects for interesting employment and high income will maintain their existing work ethic, engaging in school and study, and maybe taking a sabbatical or two in between. This is a good thing. However, life will become more difficult for young people from parts of societ...See More

I do not support sending a BIG check to everyone. It is a devaluation of the currency, as prices rise so that the BIG payment essentially becomes the entry price to the marketplace. So we will need to target the BIG to those who do not (or cannot) work. Yes there’s some stigma. But, first we implement Employer of Last Resort so that anyone who is ready and willing to work has a job in the Job Gua...See More

UBI creates a new difference between those people who work and earn a living and those people who, for wathever reason, don't work but still earn a living. This is going to create two classes of people (...) and for me the big issue is why do that?. I like the idea of community building by not having people that are extremely wealthy or extremely poor, but I don't like this way of doing it, becau...See More

There is almost a ‘neoclassical market equilibrating assumption’ behind most BIG analysis that says: “as long as people have cash, the market will magically provide the goods for them, allow them to acquire assets, provide them with the freedom to do what they please, etc. etc.” If the market hasn’t solved these problems now, why would it do so just because people get cash? All structures that ma...See More

Make no mistake: modern welfare states leave plenty to be desired. Disability benefits are for many people an unsatisfactory version of a basic income, providing those who will no longer work with enough to get by. But rather than upend society with radical welfare reforms premised on a job-killing technological revolution that has not yet happened, governments should make better use of the tools ...See More

Would the payment of a basic income to the whole population foster the same macroeconomic mechanism (i.e. a demand-led stimulation)? Yes if such payments anticipate additional production. But, by definition, the unconditional basic income is isolated from any anticipation and therefore from any social validation, as it is unconditional. The utility value of free work (for example the social link o...See More

This puerile regression takes multiple forms : for example the desire of receiving without never contributing to the collective effort – the latter being typical of fetuses and infants. This proposition seems of course at first very nice for whoever remembers the principles of justice. Beyond all the criticism of the unconditional income […], its main flaw seem to us within this framework. This i...See More

Paul Ariès
Political scientist. Editor of Les Zindigné(es). Observatoire International de la gratuité

To exit the true/false debate on the universal basic income, let’s defend the free public service! (…) To defend and increase the weight of free goods is to give everybody what they need to live, in an unconditional way but with a revenue largely demonetized, diseconomized. It is therefore to exit from capitalism.

(Pro UBI) argument is that, today, the technological evolution is destroying so many jobs that there is no longer any other choice than to decouple income from work. This argument is absurd for many reasons, but mainly because productivity nowadays is rising much slower than several decades ago. If, one day, productivity would increase substantially again, it will be both possible and necessary to...See More

The right-wing version of UBI (...) is that the government should provide its citizens with a basic income at the subsistence level, while providing no (or little) further goods and services. As far as I can see, this is the version of UBI supported by the Silicon Valley companies. I am totally against this. There are left-wing libertarians who support UBI, who would set its level quite high, whi...See More

Van Parijs would guarantee everyone the maximum unconditional basic income that could be sustained in a society (...) regardless of wether they were able or performing socially useful work. Lazy, able-bodied surfers would be just as entitled to that income as dependent caretakers or the disabled. (...) Van Parij's proposal effectively indulges the tastes of the lazy and irresponsible at the expen...See More

Rick Salutin
Novelist, playwright, journalist, and critic. University of Toronto

And what if the owning and renting classes simply view a BI as another source to be scarfed up through higher rents, charges, privatized highways etc., so it ends up merely expanding the gulf between the rich and the rest?(...) So the GBI just gets recycled back up to those who made it necessary in the first place. The inequality gulf worsens and is financed largely by taxes from people who can’t ...See More

Jared Bernstein
Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Are the good, effective anti-poverty programs currently in place fully funded? I’m quite certain they’re not, and thus the question for progressives is what gets us the bigger inequality-and-poverty-reducing-bang-for-the-buck: a dollar to UBI, or a dollar to things like quality pre-school, the EITC and CTC (wage subsidies for low-income, working families), expanding Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), a...See More

Henning Meyer
Social scientist, consultant and analyst. He is Editor-in-Chief of Social Europe

Paying people a basic income would not remove the fundamental problem that in the digital economy some people will do extraordinarily well and many others find themselves left behind. One oft-heard argument is that if people want more money than basic income provides they can just work a few days. If the problem is technological unemployment, however, this option is simply removed as the large-sca...See More

MIchael Hudson
Economist. Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

The problem’s not only income, but what people have to spend it on. Paine didn’t talk about universal income, he talked about everybody should have the right to a place to live, a means of their own self-support. That’s independent from income. Once you economize and financialize it, you put in a distortion. You don’t want to give people income to buy what really should be public goods and servic...See More

If someone is a taker rather than a maker, and becomes dependent on the government for their unemployment checks, that creates a victim mentality. I decided right then and there that I didn't want someone to give me a fish; I needed to be taught how to fish. If anyone wants to give you free cash, no questions asked, get suspicious. Universal basic income is a step to becoming a slave of the federa...See More

Evgeny Morozov
Writer ans researcher on political and social implications of technology.

Basic income, therefore, is often seen as the Trojan horse that would allow tech companies to position themselves as progressive, even caring – the good cop to Wall Street’s bad cop – while eliminating the hurdles that stand in the way of further expansion. Goodbye to all those cumbersome institutions of the welfare state, employment regulations that guarantee workers’ rights or subversive attemp...See More

Tyler Cowen
Professor of Economics, George Mason University & author of Average is Over

"Let’s send a check to everyone" is an appealing idea, but I've come around to the view that doing so would do more harm than good. [...] It eventually would choke off immigration to the U.S. Voters don't like sending money to immigrants.

The oligarchs do not propose structural change. They do not want businesses and the marketplace regulated. They do not support labor unions. They will not pay a living wage to their bonded labor in the developing world or the American workers in their warehouses and shipping centers or driving their delivery vehicles. They have no intention of establishing free college education, universal governm...See More

Paul De Grauwe
Economist. Professor in European Political Economy at the London School of Economics

A universal basic income that has the ambition to ban poverty from the world, is then immensely expensive. That doesn’t need to surprise you. To give the poor (a minority in society) a basic income, you have to also provide a basic income to the large majority that doesn’t need it. This leads to new problems. The working majority receives a basic income that stands loose from labor efforts, bu...See More